Chrome extension for blocking and reporting content farms to Google

It is a well-known fact that to search for a product review on Google has become almost pointless, and that the search engine is continually battling the rising number of content farms and scrapers (people who “scrape” content from sites and paste it on theirs only to improve their page ranking).

The company is obviously aware that this is becoming a large problem and its researchers have been thinking of ways to solve it. One of the ideas they are exploring is to give users the possibility to report a site that fits the description, so they developed an extension for the Chrome browser.

Once installed, the results given by Google Search will be followed by the “Block” option:

A click on the link does just that, and you won’t be seeing this site in search results again – or until you unblock them yourself). It also sends the information about the site to Google, which will then study the feedback and see if they can use it as a potential ranking signal.

All in all, it’s not a bad idea from Google, although it would be even more helpful if such an extension could be made for other browsers, too.